Community

We had a discussion last night at dinner about community. Why its important, what it means these days, how to find it, how to sustain it. It's interesting that within the span of a few short days the 27 of us, from all over the country, from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different interests (yet oddly, all the same political leanings) have come together to create a community of people centered around the idea of contributing and giving back to other communities.

Some of us are here because we want to give back of ourselves after receiving so much. Others are here looking for ways to build community so that those skills can be brought home and put to work in our own hometowns. There's an incredible passion, and a huge source of inspiration present here in New Orleans. Just in the few days our group has been here, we've met and worked with 5 very different and very committed organizations doing work in this city to rebuild and restore the city to something better than it was before Katrina ("Pre-K"). The amount of resolve, love, and community support required to undertake something as large as rebuilding a city and its people is not insignificant, and yet it seems to overflow from every person we've met and worked with in this city.

At the end of this week, I think I'll have a different sense of what it means to be a part of a community, and will have found new ways of thinking about creating and sustaining communities. It occurs to me that being part of a community used to be a given, yet these days its not quite so common. We are often taught to value the individual above all else, and increasingly we live in a world so fast-paced and technologically focused that its easy to get away with not being a part of any particular community. Already this week I am learning that the benefits of being part of a community are too rich and too varied to pass up, And I'm noticing that I haven't been intentionally nourishing my communities, nor helping to build the communities I want to be a part of.

All of this comes down to relationships and valuing people, the stuff of which communities are really made. I think the biggest underlying reason for this trip, and this work, is that we were all brought together by a desire to create a better future for this world. And how attainable this goal seems with 27 other folks by your side, even if our spontaneous community dissolves when we all return home on Sunday. We will surely all carry these lessons about community with us, and the ripple effect of this experience will touch many more lives beyond the work we do here this week in New Orleans, as we come home to our communities as changed individuals.